Now in paperback, Jim Harrison's best-selling poetry book In Search of Small Gods is where birds and humans converse, autobiographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined - from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe - Harrison calls upon readers to live fully in a world where "Death steals everything except our stories."

Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of
gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed
themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat
and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves
as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of
lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could
go to . . .